Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read

by Paul Connolly

  Further support came from strange places. I have already mentioned the various policewomen I had been involved with over the years. Anthea, the woman I had been going out with at the time of the assault, came to give evidence at the court case. Anthea and I had since split up, but she was a good friend for me during the trial, and she wasn’t afraid to put herself on the line on my behalf. Speaking as a police officer, Anthea gave a long statement saying that, in her view, I had not been dealt with in the correct way by her colleagues in uniform. I had been straight with the police about what had happened and what my role in it had been.

  I owe Anthea a lot for turning up on my behalf and telling the truth to the jury and the rest of the court, not least because our relationship had ended some time before, and I was already seeing someone else. I will always be grateful to Anthea for coming through for me.

  Because of the type of people I had come to know, I was able to call on friends who worked in blue-chip organisations who were able to come and give character references for me. As well as Anthea, several friends with upstanding reputations and sterling CVs came and testified that I was a good bloke, and I think that the judge was surprised by the calibre of my friends.

  As the trial drew near to an end, I was taken out from the cells and placed in front of the court and jury to hear my fate. I had been dreaming – mostly nightmares, of course – about this moment for the last eighteen months. Now that it was actually happening, it didn’t quite seem real. I thought that I had reason to hope a little bit, but how much? It was very hard for me to tell how things would go. I didn’t want to give in to hope, only for hope to be dashed to the ground when I was sent away.

  Every time defendants come into the court, they are frisked to make sure that they are not carrying anything that could serve as a missile to throw at the judge. On this particular day, they forgot to search me and, as I stood there while the judge was deliberating, just before summing up the case and making his final statement, my phone went off in my pocket: ‘Pump up the volume, pump up the volume.’

  As I fumbled to turn it off, the jury started to laugh. My hands were trembling too much to turn it off and it kept on ringing. It seemed to get louder and louder.

  ‘Pump up the volume, pump up the volume.’

  ‘Why has that man got a phone on him?’ the judge asked severely. ‘He could have thrown it at me. There are rules against such things for a reason, you know.’

  ‘Pump up the volume, pump up the volume.’

  The police took the phone from me as quickly as they could reach me, but they couldn’t figure out how to turn it off, so they brought it into a nearby cell and left it there. The ringtone echoed inside, magnifying it until the sound completely dominated the courtroom.

  ‘Pump up the volume, pump up the volume.’

  Still the police couldn’t turn it off and by now the jury and even the lawyers were almost in hysterics.

  Shit, I thought, this isn’t helping my case at all. The judge was looking thunderous.

  Eventually, the phone got turned off and the judge continued, but he did not look happy. He summed up efficiently and sent the jury out to do their deliberations.

  The case had lasted from Monday to Friday, and the jury went out at lunchtime on Friday to discuss my case and decide my fate. Earlier, my barrister had been giving me some plain talking. It seemed that he was less impressed with the hope that Ray had injected into the proceedings than I had been.

  He went on to advise me of alternative strategies in the light of the proceedings. He explained that if I admitted to Section 20 – Grievous Bodily Harm – I would receive a lesser prison sentence. If I accepted this charge, I could avoid a Section 18 – GBH with Intent, a much more serious crime. I was stubborn, though; I had done nothing wrong and didn’t see why I should admit to something of which I was not guilty.

  ‘No fucking way,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do anything wrong and I’m not going to stand here and say that I did.’

  I looked down at my hands, which held tightly on to the edge of the desk. My knuckles were white with tension. I could see that my hands were trembling, but I could do nothing to control them. Still, there was no way on earth I was going to plead guilty. I had spent my whole life trying to stand up for myself whenever I found myself facing a bully, and I was not about to stop doing that now that I was facing this new challenge and the devastating prospect of several years behind bars and the loss of all the things I had worked so hard to achieve.

  The jury stayed out for an hour, which is a very short period for deliberation. It didn’t feel short to me, though; that was the longest hour of my life. But, when they filed back in, they were all smiling and looking quite relaxed. I remembered that I had been told that a smiling jury never convicts. I felt another glimmer of hope.

  We all rose to listen to the verdict. The foreman of the jury stood.

  ‘Have you reached a unanimous verdict on both charges?’

  ‘Yes, your honour, we have.’

  By now I was cacking myself big time.

  ‘In the case of the charge of Mr Connolly, Section 20, Grievous Bodily Harm, how do you find?’

  ‘Not guilty.’

  You could have heard a pin drop in the court. I had been found not guilty for GBH, but that made it more likely that I would be found guilty of the more serious charge, which would mean a minimum of five years in prison.

  ‘In the case of the charge of Mr Connolly, Section 18, Grievous Bodily Harm with Intent to commit Grievous Bodily Harm, how do you find?’

  ‘Not guilty.’

  Not guilty!

  I had been so convinced that I was going to be found guilty and sent away to serve the prison sentence that Auntie Coral had convinced me was hanging over my head, I didn’t hear the word ‘not’ and for an awful moment my heart sank and I began to look around for the coppers who were going to take me away.

  But then a great cheer broke out in the gallery as my friends and supporters rose to their feet, clapping and cheering.

  Well, they can’t be cheering if I am going to prison, I thought. Perhaps everything is OK after all …

  The judge said, ‘You are free to go, Mr Connolly,’ and added, ‘This case has been a waste of taxpayers’ money. If you had been walking in the street rather than working on the door when five men attacked you, it would never have come to trial at all.’

  I was so relieved that it didn’t occur to me to thank the jury or the judge for the outcome of my trial. I ran out of the courtroom as quickly as possible. The men I had beaten up outside the club had not been able to take me out, but the waves of emotion that crashed over me now certainly did. Suddenly unable to bear my own weight, I collapsed on to the floor in the corridor outside, and one of my friends had to pick me up off the floor and help me to stand straight as I gathered my emotions. The sudden relief of the stress that had been weighing me down for a full year and a half was almost more than I could bear, and I felt overcome with exhaustion of a sort that I had never experienced before.

  The jury had found that when I beat those men I had been acting in self-defence, and I used reasonable force. In the circumstances, my violence had to exceed theirs because, if it hadn’t, there would have been a real, serious risk that I could have been killed. I should never have been arrested in the first place and fifty thousand pounds of taxpayers’ money had gone down the drain.

  Being found not guilty of committing Grievous Bodily Harm and Grievous Bodily Harm with Intent was a real turning point in my life because not only had I come up against the genuine risk of spending an extended period in prison with all the associated losses and damages to my career, but I had had to confront my deepest fear – that everything Auntie Coral and Starling had said about me during the course of all those years was actually true.

  I told myself that I would no longer put myself in the sort of situations in which such things were likely to happen. I resolved that, from then on, I would be the sort of person of whom I could b
e proud.

  After that, I stopped doing door work, concentrated wholly on my career as a personal trainer and I turned my back on anything that was seedy and underhand, or flirted with illegality or with violence. I promised myself that things would be different from now on and that I would keep my temper in check.

  Perhaps it was because of the turning over of a new leaf and my decision to stay away from sticky situations, but, shortly after the trial, I got back in contact with Mary for the first time in almost twenty years. I think that I wanted to show her that I had turned out all right, despite everything. I had often thought about Mary in the intervening years, but I had never contacted her because I had a feeling that she would not have been particularly proud of the sort of person I had become since she had last seen me at the age of twelve or thirteen. I also suspected that she would not have approved of the type of people with whom I had mixed. Once I had decided to definitively draw a line under that way of life, I started to wonder how Mary was and to remember how she had been a beacon of hope for me in an otherwise desolate childhood. I wrote a letter to an address that I found on a letter I had received from her many years earlier. Mary had moved to another house in the meantime, but the letter was duly forwarded and contact was renewed.

  I learned that Mary had been through some tough times of her own. She had broken her back in a car accident, and wasn’t able to ride her horses any more. But she was making the best of things and getting on with life.

  ‘So what are you doing, Paul?’ Mary asked.

  ‘I’m the head personal trainer for the David Lloyd clubs in Essex and the South East.’

  Mary was silent.

  ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s just that Spencer’s a personal trainer too and he’s the head personal trainer for the David Lloyd clubs on the south coast.’

  Perhaps all those games of tennis I had played with Mary as a child had more of an influence on the choices I made than I thought.

  Mary and I talked for a long time, and I was very happy to realise that our old bond had not been broken. After all, she had been the closest thing to a real mother figure that I had ever had, and that sort of affection runs deep. I told Mary about my successes in boxing, and the accident that had cut my boxing career short. Spencer had a boxing background too. The parallels between our lives were almost eerie. I had often wondered how my life would have turned out if I had really become Mary’s adopted son. If Spencer is anything to go by, some parts of mine are likely to have been very similar, although, of course, Spencer had never done some of the nastier things that I did, or worked in the shadows as I had done for so many years.

  It was wonderful to know that I had escaped the prison sentence that seemed to have been hanging over me not just since the incident at the nightclub, but since birth. It was wonderful to have renewed contact with the one woman who had shown me throughout my childhood that women could be kind and nurturing, generous and gracious. Finally, I could sense a sort of calming of the disturbed waters of my soul. Now in my mid-thirties, it seemed that I was entering a new, happier period of my life and that I might be able to continue moving onwards and upwards.

  But I didn’t realise that another and very significant turning point lay just ahead.

  11

  THE MAPPERTON CASE

  I had not answered the door when the cops came around first because, two weeks earlier, I had been involved in a road-rage incident and had knocked out an off-duty copper. My old anger still simmered beneath the surface, and my resolve to avoid situations that might conceivably lead to violence didn’t have a clause to deal with the rude, aggressive drivers I seemed to come up against on a regular basis. This man had deserved the dig he took, but, as cops always stand up for each other, I had been concerned that there might be repercussions and afraid that the two women officers on my doorstep meant that there could be a spot of trouble ahead. Having just been found innocent of a charge of GBH, getting into legal difficulties again was the last thing I wanted.

  What had happened was this: a driver behind me in a fast car with a girl he was trying to impress had been driving right up behind me on an Essex road flashing his lights and generally being annoying. Remembering my promise to myself to avoid getting into the sort of situations that could become difficult, I pulled over into the slow lane to let him past, but the idiot wouldn’t go; he just kept driving right behind me, flashing the headlights and making gestures that I couldn’t quite make out but that I suspected were obscene.

  I stopped at the traffic lights, and so did he. He jumped out of his car and started to approach me with a swagger. That was enough. I had been as patient as possible for a man with a short fuse. I got out of my car, closed the door and faced him. I could see that he had something in his hand, and I certainly did not want to be the first to get hit, so I punched him hard and he fell heavily on to the ground while his girlfriend looked on, shrieking and wobbling on her high heels.

  Then I saw that the thing in his hand was a luminous police jacket.

  Fuck, I thought. Great fucking timing. This was the last thing I needed at this particular point in my life.

  The policeman came around and staggered to his feet. ‘You’re in trouble, mate,’ he said. ‘I’m going to read you your rights.’ He got me into a bear hug.

  ‘Mate, I’m leaving,’ I said. ‘You provoked me and I’m pretty sure I haven’t done anything much wrong here. Let go of me.’

  He wouldn’t let go so I head-butted him, left him groaning on the floor and drove off.

  When I left to get petrol the next morning, about twenty police officers surrounded me and nicked me for assaulting a police officer. They took me down to Romford Police Station where I was greeted with outright hilarity, because the man I had hit had been an Essex copper, and the Romford boys are not fond of the Essex police.

  ‘Look,’ I was told, ‘this guy was an idiot. He’s a young copper and he was trying to show off in front of this girl and, when he saw you speeding or whatever it was, he wasn’t even on duty and had no right to do anything. This isn’t going to go any further. Trust me. This will be dealt with. He’s in serious shit because he was overstepping his remit.’

  In fact, I even got an apology from the coppers and a letter saying that there wouldn’t be any more action.

  But then these two women police officers came and would not go away. They just kept coming and knocking on my door and trying to peer in through the front window. They would leave, and then come back. They would stand and wait, talking quietly among themselves. This happened many times, and, as I assumed that they had come because of the incident with the copper, I didn’t answer the door because I just didn’t want to know about it. But then I realised that they must have been there for some other reason, although I had no idea what it might be.

  Eventually, as you know, I let them in.

  When they told me that a big investigation was ongoing into the abuses at St Leonard’s, I was deeply shocked, because it had never occurred to me that anyone would ever be punished for what they had done or that I would ever find myself in an encounter with the coppers in which they were doing their best to be kind and to make me feel at ease.

  While, of course, I was pleased that perhaps the men and women who had done so much damage to so many children would finally get in trouble for their crimes, I also learned that most of the kids I had grown up with were dead, many years before their time, and that, awful as my childhood had been, many of the others – including my best mate Liam – had it a lot worse than me. I learned that I had not even realised quite how bad things had been at St Leonard’s. I had thought that I had been living through hell, but I hadn’t even known the half of it. All of us kids had known about the sexual contact between the adolescent children and the caregivers, and obviously we had known about the violence and abuse, because we had all suffered it to varying degrees. But now I learned that the abuse had been more widespread, more organised and more
sinister than I had ever realised. So much so that many of the kids who had grown up in the home had found life too intolerable to continue with and had decided to end it, in one way or another.

  Apparently, the first formal complaints against the abusers had been made in the mid-1990s by someone who had been there at the same time as me, but it had taken some time for the investigators to uncover enough evidence to bring the case to trial. It would take a couple of years for the case to come to court. Meanwhile, anyone who had survived their experiences of St Leonard’s and now learned that many of their childhood friends had not would just have to learn how to cope with a massive dose of survivor’s guilt.

  They hit me with everything: ‘Were you in St Leonard’s children’s home? Are you Paul Connolly? We’ve got some bad news for you, I’m afraid. All the children you grew up with are dead, except for one, and he’s in prison.’ Despite the fact that several of my girlfriends had been police officers, I had always tended to see the coppers as enemies who couldn’t be trusted and who should generally be avoided as much as possible. Now I realised that they could be human too.

  Everything slowed down and I felt as though I was leaving my body. With a couple of sentences, the women police officers had taken me back twenty years. Almost all the people I had thought were living their lives somewhere, and possibly doing better than me, were dead.

  Dead!